“So why didn’t Kenny give me more gold for the kill?” I asked for the fourth time.
“I don’t bloody know! You don’t have a human system!” Bulldo snapped.
He was chained and manacled. His arms and legs linked together, and the linking chains tied to… well, it was a radiator, in essence. The reality was it was fueled by the souls of fire avatars or something, but its job was to output heat and keep this little corner of an industrial floor cosy and warm.
The only thing keeping him contained was the snazzy bracelet I’d slapped on his wrist, a piece of magitech courtesy of the combined efforts of Tim and Inedible-Reg. Without it the bastard would have teleported away as soon as I snatched him up by his well-tailored neck.
“Normally, people give more gold the higher level they’ve got. I’ve killed an ancient vampire, an ancient dragon, a bunch of surprisingly high-paying pixes, but Kenny gave me bugger all gold. Why?”
“Bob, he doesn’t know. How about we move on to the next part of your master plan?” Kat said with a sigh. I looked over and hurriedly glanced away. Her costume had been updated. Leather straps, thigh-high boots, spiky buckles. A whip instead of her original sword. She wasn’t very happy. I turned back to an equally unhappy gangster.
“Fine. I got into the Library once, you know? Used a portal stone to go straight to the room you took me to that first time, but it doesn’t work anymore. Why?” I teased the last strand of meat out from the scale and tossed it to one side, producing another one like I was eating oysters. The scales were too valuable to leave lying around, so I was noting where every one of them ended up, but right now I was trying to interrogate a thug and needed the vibe.
“They’ll have updated the signature tracker. You aren’t on the white list… You can’t portal in,” Bulldo muttered, his eyes widening as I scooped out another chunk of dragon flesh with my teeth.
“Sho…” I took a moment to swallow and clear my mouth, “I need a man on the whitelist to get me in.”
“It won’t work, you asshole. Do you know how many vamps are down there? How many ghouls and familiars have they got? You’d need an army,” he snapped.
“We’ve got one of those,” Kat offered, snapping her whip to one side and leaving Bulldo with a weirdly ambivalent expression. Was it sexy or terrifying? He clearly couldn’t decide because his face was twitching between emotions. “All we need is a way in.”
“It won’t be enough. The Library still exists for a reason. They’ve been around for longer than you–”
“If I go there, they’ll just attack me.” I waved a paw that trailed golden lights. “So all I need to do is get there. I’m starting to think I should kill you, reanimate you, and use you to teleport in a strike team.”
He shivered in fear. I wasn’t enjoying this, or at least most of me wasn’t. Vanity was feeling kind of smug, preening in a mirror, but Greed was still inconsolable about the lack of gains from killing Kenny. Wrath was… still pissed off.
“There’s no need for that! I’m happy to help, but you’re in more of a bind than you think.”
I flicked the chains tying his hands and feet together with a claw and smiled. A dragon smiling is rarely a reassuring sight. “You reckon?”
“I can’t teleport unless you take off that bracelet.” He smiled in a way that made me think of a frog when it sees a fly buzzing past it’s nose. “So there needs to be an element of trust.”
“Do they have mind mages here, Kat?” I asked.
She raised a hand to rub at her hopefully leather cat ears and grimaced. “They aren’t trustworthy, Bob. Mad as a bag of ferrets hopped up on PCP.”
“I’m wondering if there’s someone who can pluck out my memory of the location and be able to teleport there based on when I went. Someone unknown and not blocked by the wards.” I was a very clever dragon.
“No. They’d need to see it themselves,” Kat replied with another whip crack. Damn.
“Then we need to use Bulldo?” I looked at her by mistake and quickly glanced away. I couldn’t blush in my dragon form, but if it were possible, I would be doing so. Too many tassels. I took another mouthful of Umbraxis’s remains to cover my embarrassment. I felt a little bad for taking the costume roulette evolution.
“It seems that way. You could let me work him over for a bit. Might make him more… cooperative.” She took a step forward, and Bulldo huddled away.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“I’m bound! If you push me hard enough to betray Dalgliesh, I’ll die.”
“We aren’t moving against Dalgliesh, bully boy. The target is the Library,” I pointed out.
He considered it for a minute, then sighed. “It would still come down to trusting me. I can teleport you in, but I could teleport you somewhere else instead. Like a volcano, or a hundred miles into the sky.”
Kat’s wings had been transformed by this latest costume and now resembled tiny bat wings. She fluttered up to perch on my snout, filling my vision with leather and bare flesh.
“So we’ve reached an impasse,” she said sternly.
“Pretty much.”
“I could just kill him and reanimate him,” I offered.
Kat sat down on my snout, sitting side saddle, thankfully. “It’s looking like the only option.”
“Look, guys, we can work something out! How about some kind of guarantee?”
“You don’t have anything to leave behind with us,” I pointed out. “Is there a spell for removing body parts and keeping them alive? He only needs one hand to do his magic.”
“You’re thinking too high, Bob. Regrowing a hand is no problem, but a man would always come back for something else,” Kat replied thoughtfully.
“Caelebs holy trousers! What’s wrong with you people?” Bulldo snapped. “How about gold?”
I cocked my head, causing Kat to latch onto a nostril. “How much?”
“Everything I’ve got!”
“How about we hire you?” Kat suggested.
I shook my head vigorously, sending her fluttering upwards as she righted herself. “You don’t seem to understand how gold works, Kat.”
“He hasn’t got enough to make a difference to your hoard now, scale brain. I guarantee it. But he works for gold, and we aren’t asking him to go against his boss.”
“You kind of are,” Bulldo supplied helpfully. “The Library do a lot of work for us.”
“Are they part of his organisation?”
“Well, no. You’ve avoided breaking the contract because you haven’t hurt me, and Kenny attacked your guy first, acting on his own without orders. You’ve got lucky, I don’t think you want Mrs Sanderson to make a petition to Karen, may she be blessed in triplicate.”
“So we make a new contact, you and us. You’ll get our friends and us in there. In exchange, we don’t kill you, and we pay you,” Kat said.
Greed was unamused, to say the least.
“I’m not sure we need to go that far,” I objected.
“A single-use contract. He gets us access to the Library, then he can jump out, and he’s done.”
“Why don’t we pay him something even more valuable than gold?” I suggested.
“What the hell would you think was more valuable than gold?” she asked.
“Not my opinion. Obviously, gold is the best. But some people value things more than shinies. Weird, deviant freaks, perhaps, but they exist. For instance, about now I bet Bulldo would value his time and his liberty a lot more than a few handfuls of shinies.” Clever dragon.
Bulldo glanced down at his shackled limbs and swallowed audibly. “How many need to get in?” he asked quietly.
“Me, Kat, and say ten more.”
“Why the hell do you need me?”
“I thought you’d appreciate a day out?”
“A subterranean warren of vampire nests filled with undead monsters is not my idea of a vacation, Bob.”
“You’ll love it. Get to use that whip in anger,” I cajoled.
“I’ve got your minions for that. Pedro has taken to deliberately acting out since I got this bloody costume.”
“He was always fond of you,” I said.
“That isn’t fondness. It’s creepy.”
“So twelve? I’ll need to draw a circle for that many, and I’ll need to set it up inside the city. I can’t jump down to the crypts from here.”
“Some of them will be rather large. You got any weight limits?”
“You’ll need to be in human form,” he replied, glancing down the length of my glorious bescaled body. “How big are the others?”
“About three times the size of a regular person,” Kat said.
“All ten?”
“No, just two.”
“I can work with that.” His chains clanked as he scratched his chin with one hand. “Get the contract.”
“Here’s one I made earlier,” Kat said sweetly, producing it from thin air and dropping it down into his free hand. He glared at the pair of us, and we smirked back down at him.
“Fine,” he muttered after reading it over. Kat produced a pen, and he signed. The contract rolled itself up, floated into the air, and vanished, adding even more sparkles to the air. “When do we leave?”
“I’ve got one thing to do before we set off. I need to evolve.”
Biomass stored:
573.8 KG
Biomass required for evolution: 300 KG
Congratulations! You’ve received an Epic roll!
Rolling for evolution choices…
Please select from the following three options:
-
Internal Armour
-
Geriatricidal Maniac
-
Trusty Sidekick
I had Kat explain them to me. Internal Armour would force someone in my stomach to overcome my ARM stat. It would stop powerful creatures from kicking their way out if I ate them. It was tempting.
Geriatricidal Maniac gave me a powerful edge when it came to killing very old things, and Trusty Sidekick would summon a system forged pet.
“What kind of pet?” If it were some kind of tiger or whatever that I could leave to keep an eye on Edible-Reg and my hoard, that was tempting.
“Could be anything. A guardian? Maybe a wizard's familiar,” Kat replied.
“It’s not like I tend to have much luck with the system. It spawned Harald and Pedro.”
“And Salnia. She turned out all right.”
“She spends all her time clearing dungeon floors and levelling like a crazy woman. She hardly ever does any actual bloody work.”
“You have been reading my reports,” Kat said cheerfully. The vast stacks of tiny paperwork were largely ignored, but I skimmed a few bits here and there. I wasn’t about to correct her misunderstanding, though.
“And when I got the god forged scales, I got tortured by that bastard god for days!”
“It was only a few hours, Bob. Don’t be so dramatic.”
“So you vote pet?”
“I vote pet,” Bulldo chimed in, earning a double glare.
“I don’t. I think the choice is obvious, Bob. Just embrace your inner granny killer.”
“It’s vague.”
“You’re about to go up against a bunch of vampires. Even the youngest of them is going to be hundreds of years old. The system is trying to help you out.”
“Having an armoured stomach would be equally as useful!”
“Bulldo, will Bob be able to fight as a dragon in crypts?”
“In a few places, maybe. It’s tight down there.”
“Fine,” I grumped as I made the selection. There wasn’t any pain or flashing lights; it wasn’t that kind of evolution. “Let’s go put the undead out of my misery.”